Leadership Quote: The Key Is Not To Prioritize What Is On Your Schedule..

Leadership Quote: The Key Is Not To Prioritize What Is On Your Schedule..

by Elisa SpainNo Comments

This month’s leadership quote:  The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. – Stephen Covey

We often hear time management tips about taking time to plan your schedule. What we often hear is to prioritize what is on the schedule. What Stephen Covey reminds us with this quote, is to pause, choose our priorities and then schedule them.

As a leadership coach, I recommend the following 5 step approach to my Vistage members and coaching clients:

  1. Start with the wheel of life, what are my “spokes”?
  2. What do I need to feel in balance with each of the spokes on my wheel? Remembering that balance is different for each person, see 2/5/12 blog: The Ever Elusive Search for Work/Life Balance
  3. What are my 3 or 5 year goals for each spoke?
  4. What actions do I want (need) to take this year to move me toward those goals?
  5. Each day, when planning the day, ask this question: How do I want to spend the 16 hours I am not sleeping so that I complete the actions I set for myself this year?

Leadership Vs. Management – Does It Matter?

by Elisa Spain5 Comments

Recently, one of my Vistage members asked the group this question: “What is the difference between leadership and management?”

He heard a lot of responses and the one that said it best was this one…

“Leadership is doing the right things, management is doing things right.”  from management guru Warren Bennis

What does it mean to do things right? Here are my top 5:

  • Leadership is setting the direction
  • Leadership is inspiring when there are tailwinds and when there are headwinds
  • Leadership is being intentional about your culture
  • Leadership is  accountability
  • Leadership is  making tough choices

And here are my questions for you:

  • What else would you add to this list?
  • If you and your leadership team did your job well as leaders and managed the agreements you have with your team, how might the role of management evolve?

 

Elisa K. Spain

Laws Of Success: Discipline Is The Bridge… What If We Could Put It On Autopilot?

Laws Of Success: Discipline Is The Bridge… What If We Could Put It On Autopilot?

by Elisa SpainNo Comments

How many times during the day do we pause and remind ourselves of what the intention of the day was?

What if instead, discipline became a habit? What would the impact be?

When I read a recent post by Tony Schwartz, author of Be Excellent at Anything, I was reminded of this quote:

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”      -Jim Rohn

Tony describes it this way:

“Put simply, the more conscious willpower we have to exert each day, the less energy we have left over to resist our brain’s primitive and powerful pull to instant gratification. According to one study, we spend at least one-quarter of each waking day just trying to resist our desires — often unsuccessfully.

Conversely, the more of our key behaviors we can put under the automatic and more efficient control of habit — by building something he  calls “Energy Rituals” — the more likely we are to accomplish the things that truly matter to us.

How different would your life be, after all, if you could get yourself to sleep 8 hours at night, exercise every day, eat healthy foods in the right portions, take time for reflection and renewal, remain calm and positive under stress, focus without interruption for sustained periods of time, and prioritize the work that matters most?

The solution is to learn how to co-opt the more primitive habit-forming regions of our brains, so that rather than reinforcing our negative impulses, they become the soil in which we build positive rituals that serve our long term interests.

So how do you get started? Begin, by slowing down. Speed is the enemy of reflection, understanding and intentionality. When we slow down, we can begin to notice both what’s driving us, and how to take back the wheel.” Click here for the full article.

For further reflection on this topic, I am reminded of these previous EKSleadership posts:

 

Elisa K. Spain

The Ever Elusive Search For Work-Life-Balance

The Ever Elusive Search For Work-Life-Balance

by Elisa SpainNo Comments

For many of us, the holy grail of success is achieving “Work-Life- Balance”. It is a topic of frequent discussion at Vistage meetings and in my leadership coaching sessions. When I start with a new client, this topic is often on the list for discussion. And yet, despite all the discussions, books and articles, many of us feel this “balance” eludes us. Perhaps, it is because we see it as an either/or – choosing between work and life so as to achieve balance?

What if instead we saw it, as James Michener did,  becoming masters in the art of living…

“Masters in the art of living make little distinction

between their work and their play, their

labor and their leisure, their mind and their

body, their information and their

recreation, their love and their religion.

They hardly know which is which.

They simply pursue their vision of excellence at

whatever they do, leaving others to

decide whether they are working or playing.

To them they are always doing both.”

Elisa K. Spain

Laws Of Success: It's All About The Ride

Laws Of Success: It's All About The Ride

by Elisa Spain4 Comments

Years ago, I was sitting on a bench at Union station. An old man sat down next to me and we engaged  in conversation. I asked him where he was headed and he replied with glee, “San Francisco!”

Wow, I said, that is a long way to go on the train. His reply: “There is as much fun in getting there as there is in being there.”

This man’s answer has stayed with me and I often think of him in these situations:

  • When I am too focused on getting to the outcome
  • When it’s time to pause
  • When it’s time to remember to be in the moment

Recently, I came across this TED Talk by Professor Srikumar Rao, who developed the first MBA course on Creativity and Personal Mastery. Professor Rao is known as the happiness teacher. Like me, he is a leadership coach and he teaches his students how to achieve success by first plugging into your hard-wired happiness.

I wonder if my traveling acquaintance, from many years ago, realized that he had seized on the secret to happiness and success…

Perhaps something to consider in the new year?

Elisa K Spain

Want Greater Success? Nurture Your Butterflies

Want Greater Success? Nurture Your Butterflies

by Elisa Spain3 Comments

Good leaders always strive to have butterflies in their stomach, says Kathleen L. Flanagan, president and chief executive of Abt Associates, a $450mm consultancy firm.

When we are out of our comfort zone, we have the greatest opportunity for success. It’s when we become complacent and run on auto-pilot that we as leaders are most at risk of failure.

In this interview in The New York Times, Kathleen describes her first big promotion, the first time she managed people, how she had butterflies in her stomach the entire first year, and how she ultimately learned to trust her gut.

Her advice is the same advice she heard from her first boss and mentor, the one who gave her that first job. “There is no blueprint, you have to make a plan and be goal oriented. Always have butterflies and always plan for success.”

To the advice she received from her former boss, Kathleen adds her own wisdom: Be flexible. Listen to people. Give them the opportunity to give feedback, tell you what worries them, what they are thinking about, what part of the strategy they think is risky.

As a leadership coach, I ask myself and you the following questions as we plan for 2012:

  • What is your vision for success?
  • What specific goals have you set to move toward your vision?
  • Are we taking the risks that create butterflies, and if not, why not?

 

Elisa K. Spain

 

 

In The Search For Self-Improvement, Don’t Forget To Celebrate Your Genius

In The Search For Self-Improvement, Don’t Forget To Celebrate Your Genius

by Elisa Spain2 Comments

The notion that we can constantly make ourselves better, in theory, is a great idea. But when does it become too much?

For me, the best way to answer this question is to notice our strengths and work to enhance them. In my Vistage work and as a leadership coach and advisor, I refer to this as discovering and working in our genius.

According to Alina Tugend, author of this New York Times article Pursuing Self-Improvement, at the Risk of Self-Acceptance, it was Dale Carnegie who ushered in the era of introspection and self-improvement.

She asserts that we have become so focused on achieving that we are never able to appreciate who we are or what we’ve already accomplished: “[W]hen we’re constantly reaching rather than occasionally being satisfied with what we have in front of us, that’s a recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction.”

For me the best way to avoid the “better, better, better” trap is to ask the following questions:

  • What am I already good at? What do I need to do to become excellent at this?
  • Of the things I am not good at and am striving to be better at, what can I delegate to someone else?
  • Can I find a way to accept being adequate or “good enough” at the rest?

Once we know and understand what we are good at, and focus on that, we not only become more effective, we become more satisfied and ultimately become better leaders.

Elisa K. Spain

Laws Of Success: When Is It the CEO's Job To Create Drama?

Laws Of Success: When Is It the CEO's Job To Create Drama?

by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Recently, one of our Vistage speakers, Don Schmincke, spoke to my CEO group on “Discovering The Leader’s Code:  Ancient Secrets For Executive Performance.”

The primary message Don drives home is the importance of having a positive Leadership Saga – because, in the absence of drama created by the leader, your team will create their own.

Supporting Don’s message, an article in the September 30 issue of Science describes the efforts of two sociologists at the University of Vermont who tried to better understand the rise and fall of people’s spirits. They studied the moods of 2.4 million people by analyzing the words they used in over 500 million tweets originating in 84 English-speaking countries over two years (February 2008 through January 2010).

What they found was a daily cycle of positive and negative feelings that seemed to apply consistently across cultures, geographies, and time zones. Around the world, people’s positive moods peaked in the morning (6-9 a.m.), dropped through the day until reaching a trough by mid/late-afternoon, began to pick up in late afternoon, and peaked again in the evening.

Both Don’s research and that of Science Magazine raise the following questions:

  • What are we doing every day, to maximize how we spend our time during the positive time of our day? (Are you reading email first thing when instead you might be working on innovation?)
  • What are we doing each day to create the kind of drama that reinforces the vision we have for our business and inspires our team to do great work?
  • What results are we likely to achieve by taking action and changing what we do each day?

Click here for a full discussion of the Science article and implications for leadership.

Elisa K. Spain

Make Your Own Rules: Adapting Warren Buffett’s “10 Rules For Success”

Make Your Own Rules: Adapting Warren Buffett’s “10 Rules For Success”

by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Make Your Own Rules: Adapting Warren Buffet’s “10 Rules for Success”

Warren Buffett’s 10 Rules for Success have become part of our lore. They first appeared as a list in a 2008 article in Parade Magazine and were based on an interview with Alice Schroder, author of Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. Buffett’s own story is inspiring, and his ten rules have helped many entrepreneurs take positive action in their own lives and businesses.

Below is the list. I encourage you to read it with the following five (OK, seven) questions in mind.

  1. What are my personal 10 rules of success?
  2. Is there something I would add to or remove from this list?
  3. So far this week, have I operated in accordance with my rules for success?
  4. Have I shared my rules for success with my team? If so, what has been the result? If not, what might be the result if I do?
  5. Have I paused lately to celebrate my successes?

Warren Buffett’s 10 Rules for Success

1. Reinvest Your Profits. 
When you first make money, you may be tempted to spend it. Don’t. Instead, reinvest the profits. In high school, Buffettt and a friend bought a pinball machine to put in a barbershop. With the money they earned, they bought more machines until they had eight in different shops. When the friends sold the venture, Buffettt used the proceeds to buy stocks and to start another small business.

2. Be Willing To Be Different. 
Don’t base your decisions upon what everyone is saying or doing. When Buffett began managing money in 1956 with $100,000 cobbled together from a handful of investors, he was dubbed an oddball. He worked inOmaha, not on Wall Street, and he refused to tell his partners where he was putting their money. People predicted that he’d fail, but when he closed his partnership 14 years later, it was worth more than $100 million.

3. Never Suck Your Thumb. 
Gather in advance any information you need to make a decision, and ask a friend or relative to make sure that you stick to a deadline. Buffett prides himself on swiftly making up his mind and acting on it. He calls any unnecessary sitting and thinking “thumb-sucking.”

4. Spell Out the Deal Before You Start.
 Your bargaining leverage is always greatest before you begin a job – when you have something to offer that the other party wants. Buffett learned this lesson the hard way as a kid, when his grandfather hired him and a friend to dig out the family grocery store after a blizzard. The boys spent five hours shoveling until they could barely straighten their frozen hands. Afterward, the pair received less than 90 cents to split.



5. Watch Small Expenses.
 Buffett invests in businesses run by managers who obsess over the tiniest costs. He once acquired a company whose owner counted the sheets in rolls of 500-sheet toilet paper to see if he was being cheated (turns out one time he was). He also admired a friend who painted only the side of his office building that faced the road.

6. Limit What You Borrow.
 Buffett has never borrowed a significant amount – not to invest, not for a mortgage. He has gotten many heart-wrenching letters from people who thought their borrowing was manageable; but became overwhelmed by debt. His advice: negotiate with creditors to pay what you can. Then, when you’re debt-free, work on saving some money that you can use to invest.

7. Be Persistent. With tenacity and ingenuity, you can win against a more established competitor. Buffett acquired the Nebraska Furniture Mart in 1983 because he liked the way its founder, Rose Blumkin, did business. A Russian immigrant, she built the mart from a pawn shop into the largest furniture store in North America. Her strategy was to undersell the big shots, and she was a merciless negotiator.



8. Know When To Quit. 
Once, when Buffett was a teenager, he went to the racetrack. He bet on a race and lost. To recoup his funds, he bet on another race. He lost again, leaving him with close to nothing. He felt sick. He had squandered nearly a week’s worth of earnings. Needless to say, that mistake was never repeated.

9. Assess the Risks. 
In 1995, the employer of Buffett’s son, Howie, was accused by the FBI of price-fixing. Buffett advised Howie to imagine the worst- and best-case scenarios if he stayed with the company. His son quickly realized that the risks of staying far outweighed any potential gains, and he quit the next day.



 10. Know What Success Really Means.
 Despite his wealth, Buffett does not measure success by dollars. In 2006, he pledged to give away almost his entire fortune to charities, primarily the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He’s adamant about not funding monuments to himself – no Warren Buffett buildings or halls. “When you get to my age, you’ll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. That’s the ultimate test of how you’ve lived your life.”

Elisa K. Spain